In Praise of Empty Space – A Rapid Poem for World Poetry Day

I was inspired to write this not serious, rapid poem (took about 20 minutes) after seeing the true map of solar system. I highly recommend you to go and see it and consider how vast our own Solar System is and how it’s mostly empty space. Then consider how small the solar system is, there are stars bigger than our whole solar system!

The Universe is unimaginably big, beyond comprehension. Consider how small are our problems, complaints, mindless fighting are in the grand scheme of things. We live on a minor planet orbiting an average star in the corner of a small, galaxy. We really should be humble about ourselves. The differences in the color of our skin, cultures, countries, content of our languages – doesn’t matter. Because each other is all we humans have got in the big empty Universe.

I had written this on Monday and wasn’t written with World Poetry Day in mind. I was not well yesterday and was occupied in something else. So posting a day late. The second last verse is inspired from the creation verse of Rigveda (see below in notes). Happy World Poetry Day!

In Praise of Empty Space or Nothingness:

“What’s the biggest thing in the Universe?”, they ask.
Answers pour: “The Sun” “The Galaxy” “The Supercluster”,
“Great Void”, “Great wall”, “Radiations in which all Cosmos bask?”
They’re all wrong, truth they tend to ignore.
The greatest thing that ever was and will be:
Is Nothingness, Empty Space, what you can’t see.

Everything that will come to be,
And everything that is gone
Comes from the Void,
And to the Void it is gone.
The cradle and cremation pyre of all the Cosmos,
The great empty space is what make everything possible.

“All the world’s a stage”,
And that stage is set in nothingness.
All beings that have come, there are and that will come,
All beings on distant planets we know nothing of.
From their childhood to their death,
from their first smile to their last breath,
All took place and all was took away, gone in the empty space.

Like to any great entity, here too the disbelievers yell,
“There’s no true vacuum, there’s no empty space”
And the naysayers gather and yelp:
“Nothingness can’t be quantified or compared”
Then all their words and all their selves,
Are swallowed whole in the great nothingness

Atoms are 99.99..% empty space,
So isn’t matter too mostly empty, in this case?
See that ocean, the planet, the stars?
You, me, this device, everything near and far;
Not only it’s encompassed by emptiness,
But from within too it’s mostly empty space.

Who knows where it ends and where it begins?
Or if this even has boundaries?
How it was started and how it will end?
Had it any beginning and does it even end?
No one knows, no one can tell,
We’d be forever ignorant of Emptiness’s tale. [1]

The whole Cosmos will once be gone,
Frozen, or in fire, shattered or condensed, to us unknown.
There’d be nothing left, just empty space,
No matter but all pervading emptiness.
Eons later a new light will shine,
A new Cosmos would breath life’s first sign,
Over and over again repeats the same story,
Oh Great Emptiness, praise on thee!

Next blog post on Health and Fitness, part 2 of self-care series would be published on Sunday.

I love space and Cosmos and would publish an app related to space soon.

Note:
1. Creation verse or Nasadiya Sukta:
“Who truly knows, who can honestly say where.
This universe came from
And where it will vanish to at the End?
Those godlike wise men who claim they know were born long
After the birth of Creation.
Who then could know where our universe really came from?
And whoever knows or does not know where Creation came from,
Only one gazing at its vastness from the very roof of the final Heaven
Only such a one could possibly know,
But does even He know?” -Rigveda, creation verse.